In the heart of Prague, at number 8 Gorazdova Street, lies the address that the project Le Case di Micòl has linked to Pavla Weisz. This young Jewish woman, born in Kraków but raised in the Czech capital, is one of the protagonists of the memory map built through the project funded by the European CERV Remembrance 2022 program.
A Life Between Cities and Passions
Pavla was born in 1927 in Kraków, but it was in Prague that she grew up and developed her love for culture and art. Like many Jewish girls of her time, her life was cut short by deportation: she was arrested and deported in 1942. Her name appears on the transport list AAh, which departed from Prague on August 10 of that year, destined for Theresienstadt (Terezin). Later, Pavla was transferred to Auschwitz.
An Address, a Threshold of Memory
Gorazdova 8 is not just a street number. In that home, Pavla lived through her adolescence, studied, and perhaps dreamed of a future immersed in beauty and art. Today, as with the other Micòls in the project, this address represents a symbolic threshold between individual experience and collective storytelling.
We don’t know much else about Pavla’s life. Precisely for this reason, it becomes important to practice what we might call “creative memory”: a respectful and imaginative form of restitution, capable of transforming scarce historical data into a moving and engaging story. This is the task entrusted to the students of the Prague Film School, who are working to reconstruct Pavla’s story through cinematic language. Through workshops, creative writing, filming, and editing, the students are transforming Pavla’s experience into a short film. This is not a traditional documentary biography, but a poetic and visual narrative, capable of evoking a life that was cut short far too soon—giving it space, visibility, and dignity.
In a complex context, where the project itself has had to navigate communication challenges and differing sensitivities, this production stands as an act of courage and responsibility. In this case, cinema becomes a bridge between generations, a universal language, and a form of resistance.
A Memory That Challenges Us
Pavla’s story is one of many that Le Case di Micòl seeks to bring back to light: not heroines or mythical figures, but ordinary girls—teenagers, daughters, students. Each with her own home, her own dreams, her own voice. Today, that street number in Prague is part of a digital map that connects past and present, art and memory, History and personal feeling.
Le Case di Micòl is a project funded by the CERV – Remembrance 2022 call and coordinated by Ferrara La Città del Cinema. Partners include: Prague Film School, Warsaw Film School, ACT (Belgium), Blow-Up Film and TV Academy (Italy), Fondazione per il centro studi ‘Città di Orvieto’, Fondazione Giorgio Bassani, MEIS – National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, Institute of Contemporary History of Ferrara, and Luigi Einaudi Upper Secondary School of Ferrara